Getting started on projects and how you move through change. Two big themes that come up a lot in my work. How your mother went into labour with you provides some insight into the energetics at play when you meet with variations of these themes in your daily life now.
Here we look with a little more detail into what is actually happening at this stage of your journey before moving into reflection to prepare for our live call where we will be exploring this more experientially.
A look at the mother baby dyad just before birth
By the time she is ready to give birth your mother’s heart has grown new muscle mass, increasing the mass of the left ventricle by up to 50%and her blood volume has increased also by up to 50% in order to support both of you. Meanwhile your heart which was beating at a maximum of 150-170 times a minutes slows to around 130-140bpm- slower but still faster than an adults. The foetus has a naturally faster heart rate due to the amount of energy they are expending to grow their body which requires the higher metabolism and heart rate to circulate blood, oxygen, and nutrients, as well as to remove waste products.
The developing baby has 300 bones compared to an adult as many will harden and fuse together over time to form the 206 bones of an adult human.
Their brain weighs about 370 grams (or 13 ounces). Which means it is proportionally much larger than an adults brain that weighs about 1300-1400g and is only about 2% of total body mass.
The babies lungs start to develop at 4 weeks and baby can ‘breathe’ at 10 weeks. At 6 months they start producing surfactant which will help prevent the lungs collapsing when they breathe air for the first time . However, the lungs are one of the last organs to mature and may be involved directly in initiating labour. In fact they are not fully mature until the child reaches around 8 years old.
The foetus at this stage sleeps up to 95% of their time ( though this is difficult to study accurately )for about 40-50 minutes at a time. No-one knows why this rhythm, but we do know that babies enter the deep REM state from about 26 to 28 weeks and for much of those early weeks they spend much of their sleep state in the REM state, moving between Rem ( active sleep) and non REM sleep about every 20 -40 minutes. It is postulated this is important for their brain development and they may be dreaming about their experience.
This life as you know it is about to come to an end with the onset of labour. Your world will change again as you move through this second transition of your human life.
The end of your womb life and beginning of your second transition
A pregnancy lasts approximately 40 weeks from the first day of your last period. But. Its not as precise as that. You may come up with several different ‘due dates’ depending on whether you are counting from your first day of your last period, going by the date predicted by an early scan, or by utilising another method of calculation such as Naegele’s rule. But baby you didn’t know about any of these methods of calculating the due date. Baby you, living as a dyad with your mother, communicating physically via the placenta and maybe in other energetic ways too knows when they are ready to be born and left alone, labour will start spontaneously at some point usually between 37 weeks and 44 weeks.
Inside the body- the processes at work
The first thing to note is that going into labour is an incredibly finely tuned and complex system that is not fully understood. We do know that there is a series of messages between the baby, placenta and mother that triggers a number of hormonal and mechanical events that culminate in going into labour.
For the baby to be born a few things need to happen.
The cervix needs to ripen. During the process of labour it transforms from a hard closed structure to a thinner, softer tissue that gradually opens and is the entrance to the ‘birth canal’
The uterus contracts – The myometrium refers to the muscular middle layer of the uterus which contracts during labour.
The foetus signals its readiness – As the baby is connected to the mother via the placenta, messages including hormones pass between the two.
As noted already we don’t understand the full system. We know that the mother increases oxytocin receptors towards the end of pregnancy and that it is oxytocin- popularly dubbed the love hormone that stimulates contractions. We know that prostaglandins are secreted by both the foetal and maternal membranes and that these encourage the cervix to soften. We can follow multiple hormonal shifts including the changing balance between progesterone and oestrogen in the mother as her uterus becomes less responsive to progesterone whilst the levels of oestrogen continue to rise. We know that the baby secretes proteins created in their lungs which are passed into the amniotic fluid and onto the mother to create an inflammatory response ( as the science terms it!) There is also an activation of babies own hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis.
All of these things are happening together as part of a finely tuned and balanced system, where the mother and baby work in partnership to move through this next transition.
That the system utilises the HPA axis of both partners, which is the central response system regulating how the body handles stress and which regulates many body systems including digestion and mood is significant to me.
When all is going well and the mother and baby are confident about their journey this process works well and is incredibly powerful. When there are stressors, things can stall or stop or never get started as the sympathetic nervous system kicks in.
What happens when there are stressors impacting initiation of labour?
Firstly, What constitutes a stressor?
I imagine you are familiar with the analogy of the tiger threat? Where a very real physical threat to your safety initiates processes in your body that will help you survive. In our modern world we often have this process activated by a different type of threat that is triggered by thoughts,, worries and anxieties that are less easily linked to obvious physical threats. But the system activates the same. This same process applies to labour including the initiation of labour.
I would categorise the stressors that the baby you faces into internal and external stressors.
Internal stressors include baby’s own thoughts and emotions in response to his/her journey so far, causing their system to emit particular hormones and signals which their body will respond to accordingly.
External stressors are made up of every signal from the outside environment which includes the mothers thoughts and emotions in response to her own environment which may include worries about other family members, money, the information care providers are sharing and the physical environment itself.
Both the baby and mother from an evolutionary perspective are expecting calm , dark , warm safe and familiar environment and anything departing from that can activate a state of alert that is the opposite for what is needed for the hormonal flow which is crucial for the birth hormones and labour itself to progress smoothly.
Unfortunately in the modern world, far too often we have deviated from the ideal conditions needed for smooth birth. And it often starts with the pressure to ‘deliver’ the baby by a certain arbitrary date followed by procedures to start labour artificially when that date passes.
What are the potential results of stress?
Under stress the sympathetic nervous system is activated, priming you for action to keep you safe from the threat and not for giving birth.
This includes the production of adrenalin, cortisol, and diversion of blood away from the organs needed for labour and towards muscles, heart, and brain to prepare the body for "fight or flight". This can result in:
Labour doesn’t start at all.
Labour starts but then stalls.
Labour starts early – baby seems determined to come fast.
Labour goes too fast which can lead to tearing and shock for both mother and baby.
As a generalisation if the sympathetic nervous system is activated earlier in the process, labour is likely to stop or stall. Think mother facing tiger wishes to run rather than give birth. If it happens later in labour, it is more likely birth will speed up. Think mother is disturbed by tiger wishes to pick up baby and run.
As you can see, with the combination of beautifully orchestrated systems working to different ends where there are adverse circumstances largely outside the babies direct control there can be a potential for some interesting dynamics to occur…
Let’s reflect
1. Consider your habitual way of starting new projects, do you leap in with enthusiasm and then falter, Do you start steady and continue steady, do you have difficult starting at all?
2. How do you respond to changes in life? Particularly changes related to your home changes that will lead to change of environment?
3. Where do you see natural strengths in how you approach new situations and projects and where do you struggle?
4.Then take a few moments to reflect on your answers to Q 1-3. How might your birth story be playing into these patterns? What insights arise as you consider how you were born alongside these patterns. If you don’t know anything consciously about your birth, sit quietly for some minutes and ask your body / baby you to show you.
